Well imagine that! PhysOrg.com reports Clifford Singer (biography), former director of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security, has completed a study (pdf)for the Stanley Foundation, which concludes that military action to influence oil production isn't effective policy.
From the article:
Singer’s latest analyses show that despite the deep-seated perception that
oil-producing regions retain a special strategic importance, with strong effects on U.S. defense planning and strategy, "The time has already passed when oil was strategically important enough to require individual industrialized nations to be prepared to intervene militarily in oil-producing regions."
Hmm, that almost sounds like acknowledgement that oil is a finite resource, and we need to look ahead.
"Universally taxing foreign oil producers through tariffs at the front end of the trade and commodity process is a more effective approach to dealing with what really has been just an inconvenience, not a serious national security problem.
"This approach would send the needed market price signals universally, for manufacturers as well as individual consumers across the globe. When properly framed, this approach should also be more broadly politically palatable than directly taxing U.S. consumers’ use of petroleum end products at an individual level, because this approach directly confronts the petroleum market manipulations of the OPEC cartel, something that U.S. policy has so far failed to do."
What? You mean invading sovereign nations like Iraq and the CIA trying to destabilize Venezuela isn't the best way to deal with a cartel?
-- Major importers of petroleum and petroleum products should impose import tariffs that "continue to rise until a mutually acceptable agreement on stabilizing petroleum prices is reached with OPEC." This agreement with OPEC should involve not only the United States, but also "a broad coalition of major energy users throughout the globe, ensuring truly consistent, systemic change in global financial and trade practices."
"If you're not with us, you're against us." Sound familiar? Instead of working together with all nations, we have to continue the economic war (and real war) between not only classes, but whole nations.
Singer said Congress should immediately pass a punitive tariff on crude and refined petroleum from members in good standing in OPEC, and any other exporting countries that "conspire to maintain prices several times higher than the cost of exploration and production."
Wait, now, that does sound like socialism to me. I mean, we want a free market system where corporations can charge whatever they want for goods & services and governments have nothing to say about it, right? That's the American way!
/end sarcasm
/begin commentary
It occurs to me lately, that while human knowledge has changed drastically, human nature hasn't, since we climbed down from the trees and crossed the African plains for new territory. Greed & ignorance are endangering our species and this planet. We are still killing each other for resources. The difference is, I don't think we'll survive long enough to evolve our way out of it.
I have a vision sometimes of an alien race visiting our planet some day in the future, and only finding the remnants of what we called civilization, and wondering just what they will think. Something tells me though, they will be shocked but the shear amount of destructive behaviour they can learn from our artifacts.
Will we ever learn in time to save our species?